George.]
NEW YORK SKETCHES
BY
JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS
[Illustration]
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1902
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published, November, 1902
Trow Directory
Printing & Bookbinding Company
New York
TO
Meade Creighton Williams
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE WATER-FRONT 1
THE WALK UP-TOWN 27
THE CROSS STREETS 63
RURAL NEW YORK CITY 99
ILLUSTRATIONS
On the Harlem River--University Heights from Fort
George _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from the New Jersey
Shore) 3
Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch
the ships go by 5
Old New Amsterdam 7
Just as it has been for years. (Between South Ferry and
the Bridge.)
New New York 9
Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white
city of the new century. (Between South Ferry and
the Bridge.)
From the point of view of the Jersey commuter ... some
uncommon, weird effects 11
(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River
ferry-boat.)
Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to
the other 13
(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)
Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth
Street 15
Even in sky-line he could find something new almost
every week or two 17
The end of the day--looking back at Manhattan from the
Brooklyn Bridge.
For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes
down along the South Street water-front 19
Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. (At the
foot of Beekman Street, East River.)
This is the tired city's playground 21
Washington Bridge and the Speedway--Harlem River
looking south.
Here is where the town ends, and the country begins 23
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington
Bridge.)
The Old and the New, from Lower New York across the
Bridge to Brooklyn 24
From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine
Street.
The old town does not change so fast about its edges 25
(Along the upper East River front looking north toward
Blackwell's Island.)
... opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green 29
... immigrant hotels and homes 30
No. 1 Broadway 30
Lower Broadway during a parade 30
The beautiful spire of Trinity 31
... clattering, crowded, typical Broadway 32
City Hall with its grateful lack of height 33
What's the matter? 34
In the wake of a fire-engine 35
No longer to be thrilled ... will mean to be old 37
Grace Church spire becomes nearer 39
Through Union Square 40
... windows which draw women's heads around 41
Instead of buyers ... mostly shoppers 42
... crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street 43
Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear ... October
morning 44
In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel 45
Diana on top glistening in the sun 46
Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top 47
... people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue 48
A seller of pencils 49
It is also better walking up here 50
... those who walk for the sake of walking 51
At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria 52
... with baby-carriages 53
This is the region of Clubs 54
(The Union League.)
... close-ranked boarding-school squads 55
... the coachmen and footmen flock there 56
The Church of the Heavenly Rest 57
Approaching St. Thomas's 59
The University Club ... with college coats-of-arms 60
Olympia Jackies on shore leave 61
Down near the eastern end of the street 65
Across Trinity Church-yard, from the West 67
An Evening View of St. Paul's Church 69
The sights and smells of the water-front are here too 71
An Old Landmark on the Lower West Side 73
(Junction of Canal and Laight Streets.)
Up Beekman Street 75
Each ... has to change in the greatest possible hurry
from block to block.
Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge 77
Chinatown 79
It still remains whimsically individual and village-like 81
A Fourteenth Street Tree 83
Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops
85
A Cross Street at Madison Square 87
Across Twenty-fourth Street--Madison Square when the
Dewey Arch was there 88
Herald Square 91
As it Looks on a Wet Night--The Circle, Fifty-ninth
Street and Eighth Avenue 93
Hideous high buildings 95
Looking east from Central Park at night.
Flushing Volunteer Fire Department Responding to a Fire
Alarm 103
A Bit of Farm Land in the Heart of Greater New York 105
Acre after acre, farm after farm, and never a sign of
city in sight.
One of the Farmhouses that have Come to Town 107
The old Duryea House, Flushing, once used as a
head-quarters for Hessian officers.
East End of Duryea House, where the Cow is Stabled 108
The Old Water-power Mill from the Rear of the Old
Country Cross-roads Store 109
The Old Country Cross-roads Store, Established 1828 110
In the background is the old water-power mill.
Interior of the Old Country Cross-roads Store 111
The Colony of Chinese Farmers, Near the Geographical
Centre of New York City 112
Working as industrially as the peasants of Europe, blue
skirts, red handkerchiefs about their heads 113
Remains of a Windmill in New York City, Between Astoria
and Steinway 114
The Dreary Edge of Long Island City 115
The Procession of Market-wagons at College Point Ferry
116
Past dirty backyards and sad vacant lots 117
New York City Up in the Beginnings of the Bronx
Regions--Skating at Bronxdale 119
Another Kind of City Life--Along the Marshes of Jamaica
Bay 121
There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections
of the city 123
Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island 126
A Peaceful Scene in New York 127
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of
Richmond, Staten Island.
A Relic of the Early Nineteenth Century, Borough of
Richmond 128
An Old-fashioned, Stone-arched Bridge. (Richmond, Staten
Island) 129
An Old House in Flatbush 131
THE WATER-FRONT
[Illustration: Grant's Tomb and Riverside Drive (from the New Jersey
Shore).]
THE WATER-FRONT
Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the ships go by.
Coastwise schooners, lumber-laden, which can get far up the river under
their own sail; big, full-rigged clipper ships that have to be towed
from the lower bay, their topmasts down in order to scrape under the
Brooklyn Bridge; barques, brigs, brigantines--all sorts of sailing
craft, with cargoes from all seas, and flying the flags of all nations.
White-painted river steamers that seem all the more flimsy and riverish
if they happen to churn out past the dark, compactly built ocean liners,
who come so deliberately and arrogantly up past the Statue of Liberty,
to dock after the long, hard job of crossing, the home-comers on the
decks already waving handkerchiefs. Plucky little tugs (that whistle
on the slightest provocation), pushing queer, bulky floats, which bear
with ease whole trains of freight-cars, dirty cars looking frightened
and out of place, which the choppy seas try to reach up and wash. And
still queerer old sloop scows, with soiled, awkward canvas and no shape
to speak of, bound for no one seems to know where and carrying you
seldom see what. And always, everywhere, all day and night, whistling
and pushing in and out between everybody, the ubiquitous, faithful,
narrow-minded old ferry-boats, with their wonderful helmsmen in the
pilot-house, turning the wheel and looking unexcitable....
That is the way it is down around Pier A, where the New York Dock
Commission meets and the Police Patrol boat lies, and by Castle Garden,
where the river craft pass so close you can almost reach out and touch
them with your hand.
The "water-front" means something different when you think of Riverside
and its greenness, a few miles to the north, with Grant's tomb, white
and glaring in the sun, and Columbia Library back on Cathedral Heights.
[Illustration: Down along the Battery sea-wall is the place to watch the
ships go by.]
Here the "lordly" Hudson is not yet obliged to become busy North River,
and there is plenty of water between a white-sailed schooner yacht and
a dirty tug slowly towing in silence--for there is no excuse here for
whistling--a cargo of brick for a new country house up at Garrisons;
while on the shore itself instead of wharves and warehouses and
ferry-slips there are yacht and rowing club houses and an occasional
bathing pavilion; and above the water edge, in place of the broken ridge
of stone buildings with countless windows, there is the real bluff of
good green earth with the well-kept drive on top and the sun glinting on
harness-chains and automobiles.
* * * * *
Now, between these two contrasts you will find--you _may_ find, I mean,
for most of you prefer to exhaust Europe and the Orient before you begin
to look at New York--as many different sorts of interests and kinds of
picturesqueness as there are miles, as there are blocks almost.
For instance, down there by the starting-point. If you go up toward
the bridge from South Ferry a block or so and pull down your hat-brim
far enough to hide the tower of the Produce Exchange, you have a bit
of old New Amsterdam, just as it has been for years, so old and so
Amsterdamish, with its long, sloping roofs, gable windows, and even
wooden-shoe-like canal-boats, that you may easily feel that you are in
Holland, if you like. As a matter of fact, it is more like Hamburg, I
am told, but either will do if you get an added enjoyment out of things
by noting their similarity to something else and appreciate mountains
and sunsets more by quoting some other person's sensations about other
sunsets and mountains.
[Illustration: Old New Amsterdam.
Just as it has been for years.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)]
But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic
beauty in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new,
vigorous, fearless republic--and whether you do or not, if you care to
look at one of these sudden contrasts referred to--not a stone's throw
farther up the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York.
This, too, is good to look at. Behind a foreground of tall masts with
their square rigging and mystery (symbols of the world's commerce, if
you wish), looms up a wondrous bit of the towering white city of the new
century, a cluster of modern high buildings which, notwithstanding the
perspective of a dozen blocks, are still high, enormously, alarmingly
high--symbols of modern capital, perhaps, and its far-reaching
possibilities, or they may remind you, in their massive grouping, of a
cluster of mountains, with their bright peaks glistening in the sun far
above the dark shadows of the valleys in which the streams of business
flow, down to the wharves and so out over the world.
Now, separately they may be impossible, these high buildings of
ours--these vulgar, impertinent "sky-scrapers;" but, as a group, and
in perspective, they are fine, with a strong, manly beauty all their
own. It is the same as with the young nation; we have grown up so fast
and so far that some of our traits, when considered alone, may seem
displeasing, but they appear less so when we are viewed as a whole and
from the right point of view.
[Illustration: New New York.
Not a stone's throw farther up ... the towering white city of the new
century.
(Between South Ferry and the Bridge.)]
Or, on the other hand, for scenes not representatively commercial, nor
residential either in the sense that Riverside is, but more of the
sort that the word "picturesque" suggests to most people: There are all
those odd nooks and corners, here and there up one river and down the
other, popping out upon you with unexpected vistas full of life and
color. Somehow the old town does not change so fast about its edges as
back from the water. It seems to take a longer time to slough off the
old landmarks.
[Illustration: From the point of view of the Jersey commuter ... some
uncommon, weird effects.
(Looking back at Manhattan from a North River ferry-boat.)]
The comfortable country houses along the shore, half-way up the island,
first become uncomfortable city houses; then tenements, warehouses,
sometimes hospitals, even police stations, before they are finally
hustled out of existence to make room for a foul-smelling gas-house
or another big brewery. Many of them are still standing, or tumbling
down; pathetic old things they are, with incongruous cupolas and dusty
fanlights and, on the river side, an occasional bit of old-fashioned
garden, with a bunker which was formerly a terrace, and the dirty
remains of a summer-house where children once had a good time--and still
do have, different-looking children, who love the nearby water just as
much and are drowned in it more numerously. It is not only by way of
the recreation piers that these children and their parents enjoy the
water. It is a deep-rooted instinct in human nature to walk out to the
end of a dock and sit down and gaze; and hundreds of them do so every
day in summer, up along here. Now and then through these vistas you get
a good view of beautiful Blackwell's Island with its prison and hospital
and poorhouse buildings. Those who see it oftenest do not consider it
beautiful. They always speak of it as "The Island."
For those who do not care to prowl about for the scattered bits
of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would call "a magnificent
panorama," there are plenty of good points of vantage from which to see
whole sections at once, such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of
high buildings, or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious
that many Manhattanese would never make use of this opportunity were
it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor on their hands. No one
ought to be allowed to live in New York City--he ought to be made to
live in Brooklyn--who does not go out there and look back at his town
once a year. He could look at it every day and get new effects of light
and color. Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every
week or two. In a few years there will be a more or less even line--at
least a gentle undulation--instead of these raw, jagged breaks that
give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great
conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings.
[Illustration: Swooping silently, confidently across from one city to
the other....
(East River and Brooklyn Bridge.)]
The sky-line and its constant change can be watched to best advantage
from the point of view of the Jersey commuter on the ferry; he also has
some wonderful coloring to look at and some uncommon, weird effects,
such as that of a late autumn afternoon (when he has missed the 5.15 and
has to go out on the 6.26) and it is already quite dark, but the city
is still at work and the towering office-buildings are lighted--are
brilliant indeed with many perfectly even rows of light dots. The dark
plays tricks with the distance, and the water is black and snaky and
smells of the night. All sorts of strange flares of light and puffs of
shadow come from somewhere, and altogether the commuter, if he were not
so accustomed to the scene, ought not to mind being late for dinner.
However, the commuter is used to this, too.
That scene is spectacular. There is another from the water that is
dramatic. Possibly the pilots on the Fall River steamers become
hardened, but to most of us there is an exciting delight in creeping up
under that great bridge of ours and daringly slipping through without
having it fall down this time; and then looking rather boastfully back
at it, swooping silently, confidently across from one city to the
other, as graceful and lean and characteristically American in its line
as our cup defenders, and as overwhelmingly powerful and fearless as
Niagara Falls. However much like the Thames Embankment is the bit of
East Fifty-ninth Street in a yellow fog, and however skilful you may be
in making an occasional acre of the Bronx resemble the Seine, our big
bridges cannot very well remind anyone of anything abroad, because there
aren't any others.
[Illustration: Looking up the East River from the Foot of Fifty-ninth
Street.]
For the little scenes that are not inspiring or awful, but simply quaint
and lovable, one goes down along the South Street water-front. Fulton
Market with its memorable smells and the marketeers and 'longshoremen;
and behind it the slip where clean-cut American-model smacks put in,
and sway excitedly to the wash from the Brooklyn ferry-boats, which is
not noticed by the sturdy New Haven Line steamers nearby. On the edge
of the street and the water are the oyster floats, half house and half
boat, which look like solid shops, with front doors, from the street
side until, the seas hitting them, they, too, begin to sway awkwardly
and startle the unaccustomed passer-by.
It is down around here that you find slouching idly in front of
ship-stores, loafing on cables and anchors, the jolly jack tar of
modern days. From all parts of the world he comes, any number of him,
if you can tell him when you see him, for he is seldom tarry and less
often jolly, unless drunk on the very poor grog he gets in the various
evil-looking dives thickly strewn along the water-fronts. Some of these
are modern plate-glass saloons, but here and there is a cosey old-time
tavern (with a step-down at the entrance instead of a step-up), low
ceiling, dark interior, and in the window a thickly painted ship's model
with flies on the rigging.
Farther down, near Wall Street ferry, where the smells of the world
are gathered, you may see the stevedores unloading liqueurs and spices
from tropical ports, and coffees and teas; nearby are the places where
certain men make their livings tasting these teas all day long, while
the horse-cars jangle by.
[Illustration: Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every
week or two.
The end of the day--looking back at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.]
Old Slip and other odd-named streets are along here, where once the
water came before the city outgrew its clothes; before Water Street,
now two or three blocks back, had lost all right to its name. Here the
big slanting bowsprits hunch away in over South Street as if trying to
be quits with the land for its encroachment, and the plain old brick
buildings huddled together across the way have no cornices for fear of
their being poked off. Queer old buildings they are, sail lofts with
their peculiar roofs, and sailors' lodging-houses, and the shops where
the seaman can buy everything he needs from suspenders to anchor cables,
so that after a ten-thousand mile cruise he can spend all his several
months' pay within two blocks of where he first puts foot on shore and
within one night from when he does so. Very often he has not energy to
go farther or money to buy anything, thanks to the slavery system which
conducts the sailors' lodging-houses across the way. There is nothing
very picturesque about our modern merchant marine and its ill-used and
over-worked sailors; it is only pathetic.
Those are some of the reasons, I think, why East River is more
interesting to most of us than North River. Another reason, perhaps, is
that East River is not a river at all, but an arm of the ocean which
makes Long Island, and true to its nature in spite of man's error it
holds the charm of the sea. The North River side of the town in the old
days had less to do with the business of those who go down to the sea
in ships, was more rural and residential; and now its water-front is so
jammed with railway ferry-houses and ocean-steamship docks that there is
little room for anything else.
[Illustration: For the little scenes ... quaint and lovable, one goes
down along the South Street water-front.
Smacks and oyster-floats near Fulton Market. (At the foot of Beekman
Street, East River.)]
However, these long, roofed docks of famous Cunarders and American and
White Star Liners, and of the French steamers (which have a round-roof
dock of a sort all their own) are interesting in their way, too, and the
names of the foreign ports at the open entrance cause a strange fret to
be up and going; especially on certain days of the week when thick smoke
begins to pour from the great funnels which stick out so enormously
above the top story of the now noisy piers. Cabs and carriages with
coachmen almost hidden by trunks and steamer-rugs crowd in through the
dock-gates, while, within, the hold baggage-derricks are rattling and
there is an excited chatter of good-by talk....
By the time you get up to Gansevoort Market, with its broad expanse of
cobble-stones, the steamship lines begin to thin out and the ferries
are now sprinkled more sparsely. Where the avenues grow out into
their teens, there are coal-yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses
and factories are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and
cereals, all of which are the best.... Farther up is the region of
slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And
so on up to Riverside, and across the new bridge to the unknown wildness
of Manhattan's farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks,
which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked upon more
often than formerly.
[Illustration: This is the tired city's playground.
Washington Bridge and the Speedway--Harlem River looking south.]
But over on the east edge of the town there is more to look at and more
of a variety. All the way from the Bridge and the big white battle-ships
squatting in the Navy Yard across the river; up past Kip's Bay with its
dapper steam-yachts waiting to take their owners home from business;
past Bellevue Hospital and its Morgue, past Thirty-fourth Street ferry
with its streams of funerals and fishing-parties; Blackwell's Island
with its green grass and the young doctors playing tennis, oblivious to
their surroundings; Hell Gate with its boiling tide, where so many are
drowned every year; East River Park with its bit of green turf (it is
too bad there are not more of these parks on our water-fronts); past
Ward's Island with its public institutions; Randall's Island with more
public institutions--and so, up into the Harlem, where soon, around the
bend, the occasional tall mast looks very incongruous when seen across a
stretch of real estate.
And now you have a totally different feel in the air and a totally
different sort of "scenery." It is as different as the use it is put to.
Below McComb's Dam Bridge, clear to the Battery, it was nearly all work;
up here it is nearly all play.
On the banks of the river, rowing clubs, yacht clubs, bathing
pavilions--they bump into each other, they are so thick; on the
water itself their members and their contents bump into each other
on holidays--launches, barges, racing-shells and all sorts of small
pleasure craft.
[Illustration: Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.
(High Bridge as seen looking south from Washington Bridge.)]
Near the Manhattan end of McComb's Dam Bridge are the two fields famous
for football victories, baseball championships, track games, open-air
horse shows; across the bridge go the bicyclers and automobilists,
hordes of them, brazen-braided bicyclists who use chewing-gum and lean
far over, leather coated chauffeurs with their eyes unnecessarily
protected.
[Illustration: The Old and the New, from Lower New York Across the
Bridge to Brooklyn.
From the top of the high building at Broadway and Pine Street.]
Up the river are college and school ovals and athletic fields; on the
ridges upon either side are walks and paths for lovers. For the lonely
pedestrian and antiquarians, two old revolutionary forts and some good
colonial architecture. Whirly-go-rounds and big wheels for children,
groves and beer-gardens for picnickers; while down on one bank of the
stream upon the broad Speedway go the thoroughbred trotters with their
red-faced masters behind in light-colored driving coats, eyes goggled,
arms extended.
On the opposite banks are the two railroads taking people to Ardsley
Casino, St. Andrew's Golf Club, and the other country clubs and the
public links at Van Cortlandt Park, and taking picnickers and family
parties to Mosholu Park, and regiments and squadrons to drill and play
battle in the inspection ground nearby, and botanists and naturalists
and sportsmen for their fun farther up in the good green country.
[Illustration: The old town does not change so fast about its edges.
(Along the upper East River front looking north toward Blackwell's
Island.)]
No wonder there is a different feeling in the air up along the best
known end of the city's water-front. The small, unimportant looking
winding river, long distance views, wooded hills, green terraces, and
even the great solid masonry of High Bridge, and the asphalt and stone
resting-places on Washington Bridge somehow help to make you feel the
spirit of freedom and outdoors and relaxation. This is the tired city's
playground. Here is where the town ends, and the country begins.
[Illustration]
THE WALK UP-TOWN
[Illustration: ... opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green.]
THE WALK UP-TOWN
The walk up-town reaches from the bottom of the buzzing region where
money is made to the bright zone where it is spent and displayed; and
the walk is a delight all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm,
exhilaration--almost intoxication, on its best days.
Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of all walks
of this sort in the world New York's is the best. The walk in London
from the city to the West End by way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and
Piccadilly, is teeming with interest to the tourist--Temple Bar, St.
Clement's, Trafalgar Square and all--but, for a walk up-town, a walk
home to be taken daily, it is apt to be oppressive and saddening, even
without the fog; so say many of those who know it best. Paris, with
her boulevards, undoubtedly has unapproachable opportunities for the
_flaneur_, but like Rome and Vienna and most of the other European
capitals, she has no one main artery for a homeward stream of working
humanity at close of day; and that is what "the walk up-town" means.
[Illustration: ... immigrant hotels and homes.]
[Illustration: No. 1 Broadway.]
[Illustration: Lower Broadway during a parade.]
And yet so few, comparatively, of those whose physique and office hours
permit, take this appetizing, worry-dispelling walk of ours; this is
made obvious every afternoon, from three o'clock on, by the surface and
elevated cars, into which the bulk of scowling New York seems to prefer
to push itself, after a day spent mostly indoors; here to get bumped
and ill-tempered, snatching an occasional glimpse of the afternoon paper
held in the hand which does not clutch the strap overhead. It seems a
great pity. The walk is just the right length to take before dressing
for dinner. A line drawn eastward from the park plaza at Fifty-eighth
Street will almost strike an old mile-stone still standing in Third
Avenue, which says, "4 miles from City Hall, New York." The City Hall
was in Wall Street when those old-fashioned letters were cut, and Third
Avenue was the Post Road.
[Illustration: The beautiful spire of Trinity]
I
Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in
New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that
they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery
Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices
which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses of the good
old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the
ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de
Peyster sits and stares all day. (Now that these old gable windows and
broad chimneys are gone I wonder how he will like the new Custom-house.)
[Illustration: ... clattering, crowded, typical Broadway]
Now, the grandmothers of these same New Yorkers, long ago, before
there were any steamships, when Castle Garden was a separate island
and Battery Park was a fashionable esplanade from which to watch the
shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills--their
grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying reticules, were
wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut shoes, along the
sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the early morning air. They did
not have so far to go in those days, and it was a fashionable thing to
do. To-day you can see almost every variety of humanity on the cement
paths from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashionable.
But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the gentle hills of
Staten Island quite as soft and there are more varieties of water-craft
to gaze at in the bristling bay. I should think more people would come
to look at it all.
[Illustration: ... City Hall with its grateful lack of height ...]
I mean of those even who do not like to mingle with other species
than their own and yet want fresh air and exercise. On a Sunday in
winter if they were to come down here for their afternoon stroll they
would find (after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less
"objectionable" people and fewer of them than on the crowded up-town
walks.
What there are of strollers down here--in winter--are representatives of
the various sets of eminently respectable janitors' families (of which
there are almost as many grades as there are heights of the roofs from
which they have descended), and modest young jackies, with flapping
trousers, and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are
to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons coming from the
Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage--with steerage tags still
fresh--whole families of them, bright-colored head-gear and squalling
children, bound for the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which
are as interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right
opposite there on State Street, including one with "pillared balcony
rising from the second floor to the roof," which is said to be the
earlier home of Jacob Dolph in Bunner's novel--a better fate surely than
that of the other New York house for which the book was named.
[Illustration: What's the matter?]
Across the park and up and around West Street are more of these
immigrant places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's
law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the smallest and
lowest-ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or tried to, in his
amateur emigranting.
These are among the few older houses in New York used for the same
purposes as from the beginning. They seem to have been left stranded
down around this earliest part of the town by an eddy in the commercial
current which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from
its original moorings.... But this is not what is commonly meant by
"down-town," though it is the farthest down you can go, nor is it where
the walk up-town properly begins.
The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway begins, somewhat above
the bend, past the foreign consulates, away from the old houses and the
early nineteenth century atmosphere. Crowded sidewalks, a continuous
roar, intent passers-by, jammed streets, clanging cable-cars with
down-towners dodging them automatically; the region of the modern high
business building.
[Illustration: In the wake of a fire-engine.]
Above are stories uncountable (unless you are willing to be bumped
into); beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight ahead or
dashing in and out of these large doors which are kept swinging back
and forth all day; very heavy doors to push, especially in winter,
when there are sometimes three sets of them. Within is the vestibule
bulletin-board with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it;
near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who knows them all,
and starts the various elevators by exclaiming "Up!" in a resonant
voice. While outside the crowd still hums and hurries on; it never gets
tired; it seems to pay no attention to anything. It is a matter of
wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the corners; all
the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-strings and rubber
faces who are thick between the corners, to whom as little heed is
given as to the clatter of trucks or the wrangling of the now-blocked
cable-cars, or the cursing truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of
the iron-workers on the huge girders of that new office building across
the way.
But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to all these common
phenomena of the city street. As a matter of fact, half of them are
not so terrifically busy and important as they consider themselves.
They seem to be in a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as
all know who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most of
them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance simply from
imitation or a habit generated by the spirit of the place. But it gives
a quaking sensation to the poor young man from the country who has
been walking the streets for weeks looking for a job; and it makes the
visiting foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped phrase
or two about Americans--next to his note about our "Quick Lunch" signs
which never fail to astonish him, and behind which may be seen lunchers
lingering for the space of two cigars.
An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes scudding down
the street. A very important young interne is on the rear keeping his
balance with arrogant ease. His youthful, spectacled face is set in
stony indifference to all possible human suffering. The police clear the
way for him. And now see your rushing "busy throng" forget itself and
stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five seconds, and still stays
there, growing larger, after those walking up-town have passed on.
The beautiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, brown stone and the green
trees and quaintly lettered historic tombs beneath and the damp monument
to Revolutionary martyrs over in one corner--no longer looks down
benignly on all about it, because, for the most part, it has to look up.
On all sides men have reared their marts of commerce higher than the
house of God.
[Illustration: No longer to be thrilled ... will mean to be old.]
It seems perfectly proper that they should, for they must build in
some direction and see what valuable real estate they have given up to
those dead people who cannot even appreciate it. Here among the quiet
graves the thoughtful stranger is accustomed to moralize tritely on how
thoughtless of death and eternity is "the hurrying throng" just outside
the iron fence, who, by the way, have to pass that church every day, in
many cases three or four times, and so can't very well keep on being
impressed by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is
just as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work. Even
though one cannot get much of a view from the steeple, except down Wall
Street, which looks harmless and disappointingly narrow and quiet at
first sight, Trinity is still one of the show-places of New York, and
it makes a pleasing and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It
deserves to be starred in Baedeker.
Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town: from Trinity to
St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical Down-Town. So much in a hurry
is it that at Cedar Street it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole
section of numbers from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not
so capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.
The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section,
occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced
a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire
day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half
of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the
Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is,
if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up
Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of
commuters pour.
* * * * *
Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, so that the
occasional old-fashioned five or six story buildings of solid walls with
steep steps leading up to the door, seem like playthings beside which
the modern building shoots up--on up, as if just beginning where the
old ones left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, or
magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows and lettering
for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like plain goods-boxes on end, or
suggest, the ornate ones, pieces of carefully cut cake standing alone
and ready to fall over at any moment and damage the icing.
[Illustration: ... Grace Church Spire becomes nearer.]
Good old St. Paul's, which is really old and, to some of us, more
lovable than ornate, Anglican Trinity, has also been made to look
insignificant in size by its overpowering commercial neighbors,
especially as seen from the Sixth Avenue Elevated cars against the
new, ridiculous high building on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its
plain, broad, Colonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem
to care so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so
large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more rural and
church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as though miles
instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.
[Illustration: Through Union Square.]
Now, off to the right oblique from St. Paul's, marches Park Row with
its very mixed crowd, which overflows the sidewalks, not only now at
going-home time, but at all hours of the day and most of the night;
and on up, under the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying
Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon come to the
Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and that, of course, is a walk
worth taking. But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway,
between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining
down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous
as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know--or, if
strangers, because we do not know--that when once we get beyond it
we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its
grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the
first trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there,
under those other trees--up near the court-house, I suppose--is where
certain memorable boy stories used to begin, with a poor, pathetic
newsboy who did noble deeds and in the last chapter always married the
daughter of his former employer, now his partner.
By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have settled down to a
steady pace; others are just falling in at this point--just falling in
here where once (not so very many years ago) the city fathers thought
that few would pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap
red sandstone in the back of the City Hall.
[Illustration: ... windows which draw women's heads around.]
Over there, on the west side of the street, still stands a complete row
of early buildings--one of the very few remaining along Broadway--with
gable windows and wide chimneys. Lawyers' offices and insurance signs
are very prominent for a time. Then comes a block or two chiefly of
sporting-goods stores with windows crowded full of hammerless guns,
smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and other delights which from
morning to night draw sighs out of little boys who press their faces
against the glass awhile and then run on. Next is a thin stratum
composed chiefly of ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you find yourself in
the heart of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one
over another, with names "like a list of Rhine wines;" block after block
of it, a long, unbroken stretch.
[Illustration: Instead of buyers ... mostly shoppers.]
II
This comes nearer to being monotonous than any part of the walk. But
even here, to lure the walker on, far ahead, almost exactly in the
centre of the cañon of commercial Broadway, can be seen the pure white
spire of Grace Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as
if purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those below that
Broadway changes at last and that up there are some Christians.
But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are they all
black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking dollars; at six
o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs and elevators, and out
upon the street with a look of relief; stenographers, cloak inspectors,
forewomen, and little girls of all ages. Then you hear "Good-night,
Mame." "Good-night, Rachel." "What's your hurry? Got a date?" And off
they go, mostly to the eastward, looking exceedingly happy and not
invariably overworked.
[Illustration: ... crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street.]
Others are emissaries from the sweat-shops, men with long beards and
large bundles and very sober eyes, patriarchal-looking sometimes when
the beard is white, who go upstairs with their loads and come down again
and trudge off down the side-street once more to go on where they left
off, by gas-light now.
And all this was once the great Broadway where not many years ago the
promenaders strutted up and down in the afternoon, women in low neck and
India shawls; dandies, as they were then called, in tremendous trousers
with huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a few strollers here by
mistake, elderly people from a distance revisiting New York after many
years and bringing their families with them. "Now, children, you are on
Broadway!" the fatherly smile seems to say. "Look at everything." They
probably stop at the Astor House.
[Illustration: ... Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear ...
October morning.]
As the wholesale dry-goods district is left behind and the realm of the
jobbers in "notions" is reached, and the handlers of artificial flowers
and patent buttons and all sorts of specialties, Grace Church spire
becomes nearer and clearer, so that the base of it can be seen. Here, as
below, and farther below and above and everywhere along Broadway, are
the stoop and sidewalk sellers of candies, dogs, combs, chewing-gum,
pipes, looking-glasses, and horrible burning smells. They seem
especially to love the neighborhood of what all walkers up-town detest,
a new building in the course of erection--with sidewalks blocked, and
a set of steep steps to mount--only, your true walker up-town always
prefers to go around by way of the street, where he is almost run down
by a cab, perhaps, which he forgets entirely a moment later when he
suddenly hears a stirring bell, an approaching roar, and a shrieking
whistle growing louder:
Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at a gallop,
the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning forward with arms out
straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke behind. Another whizz, and the
long ladder-wagon shoots across with firemen slinging on their flapping
coats, while behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who
could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell at the engine-house
could keep from ringing when the policeman turned on the circuit.
And young boys are not the only ones. No more to be thrilled by this
delight--it will mean to be old.
[Illustration: In front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.]
III
At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the
green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic
rectory. It is a glad relief. And now--in fact, a little before this
point--about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive
sign "Old London Street"--which was used now for church services and now
prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything--about
here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the
thick tree-tops of Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of
houses in all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed
even more than the direction of the street changes. A short distance
below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming
solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are
mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few
men. This is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with
cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's
statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of
the most virulent type; windows which draw women's heads around whether
they want to look or not, causing them to run you down and making them
deaf to your apologies for it. Big dry-goods stores and small millinery
shops; general stores and department stores, and the places where
the sidewalks are crowded with what is known to the trade as "Louis
Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for there being more
restaurants now and different smells and another feeling in the air.
[Illustration: ... Diana on top glistening in the sun.]
From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glittering
jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' buildings, and its
somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fashionable but now fast becoming
out-of-date and landmarky (though they seem good enough to those who
sit and wait on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison
Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-town traveller.
This will help him up the intervening blocks if he is not interested in
the stretch of stores, though these are a different sort of shop, and
they seem to say, with their large, impressive windows, their footmen,
their buttons at the door, "We are very superior and fashionable."
[Illustration: Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top.]
The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have
more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more
rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers
by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all
the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns,
actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to
Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'--the best people and the
worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright
afternoon.
When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would
have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue,
while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical
part of the Tenderloin.
But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places
of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when
homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October
morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut
against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun; a soft, purple
light under the branches in the park, a long, decorative row of cabs
waiting for "fares," over toward the statue of Farragut, and lithe
New York women, wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them,
crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tammany
policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his little finger.
[Illustration: ... people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue.]
It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side by the Worth
monument I have heard people exclaim, "Oh, Paris!" because, I suppose,
there is a broad open expanse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a
cluster, but it seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. It
has an atmosphere distinctively its own--so distinctly its own that many
people, as I tried to say on an earlier page, miss it entirely, simply
because they are looking for and failing to find the atmosphere of some
other place.
[Illustration: A seller of pencils.]
IV
Now this last lap of the walk--from green Madison Square and the new
Martin's up the sparkling avenue to the broad, bright Plaza at the Park
entrance, where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving,
with their awnings flapping and flags out straight--makes the most
popular part of all the walk.
This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, far away,
or pretending to be, from work and worry; this is where enjoyment is
sought and vanity let loose--and that, with the accompanying glitter and
glamour, is always more interesting to the great bulk of humanity.